'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
**A plaque targeting Prime Minister David Cameron, as demonstrators protest in Oxford Street, London | 26 March 2011 | Author: Mark Ramsay | 245/ | Wikimedia Commons
25 January 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – The state system emerged in the 17th century, with institutions for force. One was for internal and one for external use: the national police and the national military, national standing for the dominant nation in the states. The role of the police was to protect elites against theft and violence by the people; crimes by the law. And the role of the military was to protect the states against each other. Both police and military occasionally initiated violence.
Johan Galtung
The description just given still holds very well for the USA. “Banking scandals” give us insight in class-conscious “justice”.
Police patrol the streets, not the boardrooms. And no arrests.
But wars between states are now dwindling. They yield to wars between dominant and other nations within states, and dominant and other civilizations in the world; using state and non-state terrorism.
How did “modern” elites get these ideas? From intellectuals.
They picked Thucydides who told them that wars there will always be, and von Clausewitz who trivialized them, from Hobbes who told them that people are born violent and have to be controlled, and Machiavelli who told them that the prince has to be feared, not loved.
Or they decided themselves and picked intellectuals to confirm.
United Nations Map of Libya, with cities, roads, and the current twenty-two Districts or Shabiyah of Libya. | The UN Cartographic Section | Wikimedia Commons
Berlin – Providing healthy diets for the world’s growing urban population requires forging stronger links between rural producers and urban markets and building food systems that are more socially inclusive, environmentally sound and less wasteful, FAO Deputy Director-General for Natural Resources, Maria Helena Semedo, on 15 January 2016.*
She spoke at the opening of an FAO-organized meeting at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) taking place during this year’s International Green Week in Berlin, from 15-24 January 2016.
Semedo warned of the difficulties that many cities face in ensuring regular and stable access to adequate food for all.
“This will worsen as an increasing proportion of the hungry will be living in urban areas,” she said.
23 January 2016
AS IS well-known, Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state”.
That is its official designation.
Well…
Uri Avnery
AS FOR Jewish, it’s a new kind of Jewishness, a mutation.
For 2000 years or so, Jews were known to be wise, clever, peace-loving, humane, progressive, liberal, even socialist.
Today, when you hear these attributes, the State of Israel is not the first name that springs to mind. Far from it.
As for “democratic”, that was more or less true from the foundation of the state in 1948 until the Six-day War of 1967, when Israel unfortunately conquered the West Bank, the Gaza strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan. And, of course, the Sinai peninsula which was later returned to Egypt.
(I say “more or less” democratic, because there is no completely democratic state anywhere in the world.)
Geneva (UNHCR) – Refugee and migrant women and girls on the move in Europe face grave risks of sexual and gender-based violence, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) highlighted in a joint report issued on 20 January 2016.
UNHCR, UNFPA and WRC conducted a joint field assessment of risks involved for refugee and migrant women and girls in Greece and FYR Macedonia in November 2015 and noted that women were among those particularly at risk and required additional protection measures.
‘Mexico is ill-equipped to deal with increasing numbers of children fleeing gang violence in Central America’s “Northern Triangle”.
By Amy Stillman* – Pictures by Jonathan Levinson*
Tapachula, 20 January 2016 (IRIN) – Behind an unmarked brown door sandwiched between a rundown motel and a fried chicken joint in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, lunch is being prepared on an outdoor stove, while children sit around dusty picnic tables scrawling in school notebooks.
“If they don’t study, they can’t stay here,” said José Ramón Verdugo Sánchez.
Verdugo, a member of the Evangelical Church, founded Todos por Ellos (“All for Them”), a children’s shelter, in 2009 in response to the growing number of Central American minors arriving in Tapachula – a sleepy, tropical city about 40 kilometres from Mexico’s border with Guatemala.
25 January 2016 (WSWS) – With Syria “peace talks” ostensibly set to begin in Geneva today, Washington has ratcheted up threats of US military escalation throughout the region. In the past few days, top US civilian and military officials have declared that they are prepared to seek a “military solution” in Syria, put “boots on the ground” in Iraq and launch another US-NATO war in Libya.
A street lined with rubble and destroyed buildings in the Old City area of Homs, Syria. Photo: UNICEF/Nasar Ali
The talks themselves, which are being convened under the auspices of the United Nations, are not expected to begin as scheduled because of continuing sharp differences over what forces will be invited to attend and how the proposed agenda for a “political transition” will affect the future of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.
